we had a truck

Did you ever see Drag Me to Hell? It is, in most respects, a painfully bad movie. The scene that made me laugh so hard I choked on my fruit punch and needed several minutes to recover is no exception; it’s just also very very funny. The somewhat abridged version: Christine meets her boyfriend’s parents for the first time shortly after sacrificing her cat (long story) and makes the comment, “I had a cat.” Boyfriend: “You mean…you mean you have a cat…Unless something happened to him…” Christine: “Well, how am I supposed to know? You know how cats are. They come and they go.” Obviously, I am a terrible person for finding kitty sacrifice hilarious, but oh my god. It was perfect.

I’m telling you this so that you understand what I mean when I say that Tim and I, we had a truck.

Let me backtrack a bit. See, we’ve been looking for a truck on Craigslist, because having established the prices for renting a moving truck, our options became “buy a pickup truck” or “sell ourselves on street corners until we make enough money to rent a moving truck.” For various reasons, the second option is less feasible, so we’ve been working on the first one. Also, a truck would make transporting our canoe more convenient. That would be lovely, as right now, my middle finger on my left hand is still mostly unusable due to an unfortunate incident involving a canoe, several dozen mosquitoes, and a series of poor choices.*

We’ve had trucks in the past, but it hasn’t gone well.** However, we are endlessly optimistic, so we were sure it would go better this time. Last night, we went to go see a $750 F150 in Terre Haute. Said truck had “some rust” and “a weird steering issue,” but hey, $750, right? We met Norm, who was a nice guy with a couple of really sweet pit bulls who loved me. I petted the dogs while Tim looked at the truck, because my primary experience in the realm of fixing cars lies in creating workarounds to problems like “the sunroof leaks” or “the fan makes a ghastly noise” or “the ceiling liner falls down in front of your eyes while you drive.”***

The truck seemed okay, for a certain value of “okay,” where I mean, “seemed like it was probably worth some money.” It started right up, although the cracked windshield, lack of interior door panels, and failure of the right turn signal to function without being hand-held were mildly problematic. Plus, the driver’s side window didn’t work, which always becomes more of a problem—you go from “damn, I can’t open this window” to “this window keeps falling down all the time.” Eventually you have to jam things in beside the window to try to keep it up, and that sucks in winter when you can’t wear your coat due to the fact that it’s shoved into the door panel to hold up the window. As Tim pointed out to Norm, the tires seemed a little old, too.

Given all this, we decide that this is clearly the truck for us, and we offer Norm $600 for it after Tim test-drives it a bit. Norm hesitates, but after all, this isn’t even his truck. He traded trucks with his cousin, and then somewhere in that process, bought a different truck for himself, so now he’s got a mid-nineties Dodge. Norm tells us this with pride, making it clear that he shares the opinion of various Craigslist posters who say things like, “Will trade for different truck. No Fords or other junk. Chevy or Dodge preferred.” Norm considers our offer and proposes $650. We point at the windshield. He tries again with a counter-offer of $625. Out of a nagging feeling that we’re probably supposed to haggle (I mean, who doesn’t want to haggle?), we agree.

(Pay attention. This is where I jinx us.) I wave at the three or four tires in the bed of the truck and say, “I don’t think we need the tires, though.” Norm makes a half-hearted effort to convince us that they’re really quite nice tires, and we could use them to plant potatoes in. Pointing out that we live in a rental, Tim rejects the offer of tires to keep, so Norm’s two non-speaking sons (?) grab the tires and toss them into the garage. Norm provides us an extra passenger side mirror because the one on the truck wobbles alarmingly, expresses his regret that his cousin is in Maryland and thus cannot provide us with the interior door panel, and hands over the title.

We own a truck.

We feel pretty okay about this. Sure, the steering wheel wavers like a ninety-pound college freshman after a dozen shots of the Captain, and we might need to replace the tires sometime soon, but we have a truck! I follow Tim home, thinking happy thoughts about things we’ll now be able to transport with our truck. It’s about a two-hour drive, which isn’t too bad, and—no, wait. That’s only how it went in my head.

In real life, what happens is the driver’s side tire blows out after a mile. Yes. Pretty much exactly a mile. We call Norm and explain. Norm is surprised and distressed by this news, but thinks that maybe his uncle has some extra wheels, so he goes to check on that while we hang out in the liquor store parking lot. (Big Red Liquor, for anyone who’s keeping track.) We propose returning Norm’s truck to him, but after a while, Norm and his kind of sleazy non-speaking sons (?) show up with Uncle’s extra wheel and change our tire for us, putting the blown tire in the bed of the truck and thus returning our truck to its usual state of tire-having. We thank them and continue on.

While we’re at a gas station cleaning the truck’s amazingly filthy windshield, Norm calls Tim up and offers to take his truck back. But now we have a tire, and we figure the odds that another tire is going to blow out are incredibly low, and after all, Norm was pretty nice to come give us a new wheel, so we stick with having a truck. On the road again, I start considering possible names for the truck and have just about settled on “Bertha” when I notice that the truck in front of me has suddenly started pulling hard to the right, and a moment later, Tim pulls off onto a side street, and I remember that I don’t ever win at poker because I suck at calculating odds.

Yeah. The front passenger side tire blew out.

I have to tell you, this is a bummer. We contemplate Bertha for a little while, as Tim tries to call Norm. Norm, however, has likely gone to bed, as it is around 11 p.m. and he works first shift. We are concerned. Terre Haute does not seem like a place likely to have a plethora of tow trucks available, and at its best, AAA has never succeeded in getting any vehicle of ours towed with less than a 45-minute wait. This truck, it is clearly not meant to be ours. (And I never should have made that comment about the tires.) We go back to Norm’s place, where we explain the situation.

Norm is appalled. We are sad. Norm is a really nice guy. We are appreciative. Norm offers to take the truck back. We accept. Norm gives us our money. We offer to get Bertha towed back to his place. Norm calls his buddy, who has a tow truck. We show Norm on our GPS where Bertha is. Norm apologizes for the hassle. We apologize for the hassle. Norm gets into his new Dodge. We drive home.

We don’t own a truck anymore. We feel pretty okay about this.


* It’s amazing how necessary the middle finger on one’s dominant hand is. I’d always thought that it was mostly the opposable thumbs that allowed me to be a tool-user, but turns out, that middle finger is kind of crucial. I am in the sad sad state of being unable to cut my own meat, walk the dog, or give out terrorist fist-jabs without excruciating pain.

** Our first truck was an eighty-something Chevy S10. It lacked power steering and power brakes, which was terribly exciting, since I am just barely tall enough to drive early-eighties trucks, and that meant that I had to cling to the steering wheel whenever I had to use (stand on) the brakes. Also, it had typical Chevy issues like the Chevette that was my first car, e.g., the radio came on randomly without warning and played Spanish music very loudly for an unpredictable length of time. Having had experience with this, though, I was able to roll with it and just pretend that I’d done it on purpose, shouting, “Ay!” at appropriate points. The city stole that truck, because we forgot to renew the plates, which apparently means that the city will just come pwn your vehicle and then laugh at you when you want it back.

Our second truck was a seventies-something F150, which, again, I am barely tall enough to drive. It was orange and ugly and had typical Ford issues like sometimes not running. One day the neighbor kid asked us how much we wanted for it. We pointed out that we had no desire to sell it and also it had typical Ford issues. However, he apparently got his training in the school of “No means maybe,” because he hounded us daily until we finally sold it to him…at which point he took up hounding Tim to help him fix it. Not a good deal. We were so happy when they moved.

*** Don’t ever decide the correct solution to the ceiling issue is to just rip out the lining. Then the car takes up dropping weird bits of gluey lint onto your head and in your eyes at the worst possible time, and any time you drive somewhere, you end up looking like you have a case of chunky, yellow-tinged dandruff. Staple-gunning the liner to the car works pretty well for a short time, and as long as you keep the staple gun in the car, you can throw some more staples in there at red lights whenever necessary.